


can we talk?

by burnhounds (LittleDragonPrince)



Series: love is a tower where all of us can live [1]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 10:35:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18636412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDragonPrince/pseuds/burnhounds
Summary: With a flick of her wrist she sets the windshield wipers to a slower speed; the rain is starting to let up, less of a torrent and more of a drizzle. Jennifer doesn’t look at Leon as she asks, “Why didn’t you tell Beau where we’re going? For real?”A pregnant pause follows her question; Leon’s voice is flat, but she can see him still smiling out of the corner of her eye as he answers, “I don’t want anyone but you to know I’m leaving.”“What about your family?”His arms tighten around the backpack in his lap. “I kind of want them to think I’m dead,” he says, and he sounds so casual even as his words are so morose, it makes Jennifer double-take.“Wow, you’re a piece of shit,” she says without thinking, and then she barks out a laugh.





	can we talk?

**Author's Note:**

> I WROTE THIS FOR CLASS. ENJOY, MORE SDS PREQUEL !!!
> 
> cw for mentions of child abuse but its really vague and brief
> 
> anyhow have funnn

Jennifer’s evening of relaxation is interrupted by a sudden, frantic knocking on her door. She glances at the clock perched on the mantle above her television – it’s 6:17pm. The rainstorm outside is a dull roar against the windows and the walls of her home. She can’t even begin to imagine who’s out there on her porch, but they seem _desperate;_ when she turns her head to look she can see the door nearly rattling on its hinges as they continue to knock.

With a huff, Jennifer lifts her tired body from the couch and makes her way across the living room. “Just a minute!” she calls out, and then, under her breath, adds, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

When she swings the front door open to reveal Leon standing there, it takes her a moment to recognize him. His bleached blond hair is plastered to his face, revealing the brown roots he usually tries so hard to hide; his eyes – not obscured behind his wireframe glasses for once – are ringed with black, tracts of mascara and water guttering his cheeks; she can see him shivering, his body and his clothes soaking wet, arms wrapped tight around a blue gingham backpack she recognizes as the one he’d bought for college back in August.

“I need to go,” he says without waiting for her to greet him. His voice is uncharacteristically timid, almost drowned out by the sound of the rain beating down around him. Jennifer can barely believe that it’s really him – he seems so small and dark like this, huddled in the dark, spring nighttime. “I need to go right now, I need to –,” he cuts himself off, raises one hand to scrub at his eyes as if to calm himself down. All he succeeds in doing is smearing the dark makeup around, until one half of his face looks like a wet and shimmering bruise. With a shuddering inhale, he asks, “Can you drive me to the train station?”

Jennifer glances back, over her shoulder and into the empty living room, just to have something to look at other than Leon. There’s something, some unidentifiable feeling of anxiety, or frustration, or maybe dread, twisting around in her gut. _Ride the wave,_ she thinks to herself in someone else’s voice, and lets her eyes slide shut to breathe, _Don’t let your emotions control you. Do good things for your friends and they will feel better. You will feel better._

The words are mostly empty platitudes, but the moment of silence at least allows her to think. When she opens her eyes again, she looks to the clock by the TV. It says 6:19pm. The train station is just under an hour away. If she agrees to this, it will almost surely take up the rest of her night. She turns back to Leon, drenched and still standing, uncharacteristically patient, on her porch.

“Alright,” she says, trying to keep her tone casual despite the overwhelming _something_ she can’t name, “Just… uh… let me grab my car keys. And some shoes. And we’ll go.”

“Wait,” Leon says, his voice finally rising above the sounds of the storm; he takes his first step forwards, stopping right at the threshold of her house. This close up, Jennifer can see the veins in his eyes, the pink swelling of his eyelids; he’s cried recently, she realizes, and feels another pang in her chest. He doesn’t look close to tears now, however, expression flat and severe, and his voice is deathly serious as he says, “Let me come in and fix my makeup and my hair first.”

**xxx**

Unsurprisingly, it takes Leon forty full minutes to feel ‘presentable’ enough to pile into Jennifer’s hand-me-down Honda Civic. His hair is brushed back into its usual coiffed style, his eye makeup peachy and sunset-colored. Jennifer had thrown his skinny jeans into the dryer while he’d cleaned himself up, and he was wearing them now, along with an olive green crop top that originally belonged to her and was slightly too big for him. He’d insisted on ditching his own shirt – a floral button-up – back at her place, since it couldn’t be dry-cleaned, and thus _shouldn’t_ be worn.

The first ten minutes of the car ride passes in silence. Without any foundation on – none of Jennifer’s would be close to light enough for him to wear – she can see the heavy bags under Leon’s eyes. There’s something tired and sad about him, something unstable, and it puts Jennifer on edge enough that the sudden ringing of her cellphone makes her jolt.

“Can you, uh,” she jerks her head in the direction of her purse, which was sitting on the console between them, “Get that for me?” Leon just blinks dumbly at her and cocks his head to one side – but Jennifer is used to this response by now, so instead of getting impatient she just nods towards the bag again.

“Oh!” Leon exclaims, finally understanding, and Jennifer can’t help but heave a fond yet exasperated sigh as he fishes the phone out of her purse, presses ‘answer,’ and switches the call straight to speaker.

“Hello?” she says without taking her eyes off of the rain-slicked roads.

“Hey, Jen,” the voice of her brother, Beau, fills the quiet air. Jennifer can’t help the queasy smile that spreads across her face, the same half-giddy, half-terrified feeling she always feels talking to her family flooding her body, “I’m just, uh, just wanted to check if you were still planning on coming up for Easter?”

“Yeah!” she replies after hesitating just a second too long; to save face, she stammers out, “Yeah, sorry, I’m a bit distracted right now, I’m in the car.”

“Wh – and you answered the phone?” Beau says in an almost-shout, and Jennifer feels herself wince, “You need both hands on the – oh my God, I should hang up –,”

Jennifer cuts through his anxious rambling with a loud, “No!” He stops talking then, and for a moment she can’t find the words to speak until Leon – still holding the phone in one hand – gives her a bemused look. “I mean, I’m not alone in the car, dude, I’m not stupid. Leon’s with me.”

“Hi, Beaumont!” he says on cue, voice more cheerful than Jennifer has heard it all night – he plasters a massive smile on his face to match, even though Beau can’t see it. It isn’t an unusual sight, the way Leon will shift his whole self, becoming a new version of himself, to fit right into a conversation. It’s a little uncanny, but it’s also familiar, to the point that Jennifer is somewhat soothed by it.

“Oh,” replies Beau, and his surprise is audible. There’s a beat of silence, just barely long enough to become awkward, and then he asks politely, “Where are you two going?”

“A concert,” Leon says, right as Jennifer opens her mouth to tell the truth. She sends a confused glance in his direction, but he ignores her and plows on, “Yeah, there’s this little… local dreampop group having a concert in Vineland, my friend got us some tickets, so!”

Before Jennifer can say anything – like _what are you talking about_ or _no, we’re not_ – Leon gives her a panicked look. He wants her to play along, that much is obvious, but she can’t figure out why. Still, never one to shy away from a lie, she pipes up, “Yeah, uh, it’s a small-time gig, just at a – at a club. But it’ll be fun!”

“Oh,” Beau says yet again, and then Jennifer hears him huff a little laugh, “That does sound fun. Alright, well, I’ll let you two go – nice talkin’ with you, Leon, and I’ll see you in two weeks, Jenny.”

“Bye, Beau,” she says, biting back the urge to add an _I love you_ , and then they both wait for the sound of Beau hanging up before Leon puts her phone back into her purse.

Jennifer opens her mouth to ask Leon what the _fuck_ just happened, but he beats her to the punch.

“It’s nice you and your brother are so close,” he says, with that same saccharine smile on his face, making it impossible for his words to be mistaken for genuine. Jennifer blinks and drags her eyes back to the road, resisting the urge to tell him the truth: they aren’t close. For much of her adult life, they haven’t been close. They hadn’t even been on speaking terms until Celeste was born and Beau reached out to Jennifer.

“I always thought you were a terrible older sister,” Beau had said over the phone, before he’d even said hello, “But I realize now I can’t blame you for all the shit dad did to us, that’s just not fair.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” she’d asked, because as nice as the words were – as much as they soothed a wild, aching part of her that she tried her best to pretend wasn’t there – they were also completely unexpected. She was twenty-one at the time; it had been two whole years since she’d last seen her younger brother.

“Because Angel and I just had a baby,” he said, and right away Jennifer’s heart had begun to race in terror, in something exactly like terror, thudding against her ribs until there was no room in her left to breathe, “And yeah, I know, we’re both so young, but – we’ve decided we want to be a family. And we want you… to be apart… of that family.”

Jennifer doesn’t mention any of this to Leon, though, just shakes the bittersweet memory from her head and says, “Yeah.” With a flick of her wrist she sets the windshield wipers to a slower speed; the rain is starting to let up, less of a torrent and more of a drizzle. She doesn’t look at Leon as she asks, “Why didn’t you tell Beau where we’re going? For real?”

A pregnant pause follows her question; Leon’s voice is flat, but she can see him still smiling out of the corner of her eye as he answers, “I don’t want anyone but you to know I’m leaving.”

“What about your family?”

His arms tighten around the backpack in his lap. “I kind of want them to think I’m dead,” he says, and he sounds so casual even as his words are so morose, it makes Jennifer double-take.

“Wow, you’re a piece of shit,” she says without thinking, and then she barks out a laugh. Leon seems unbothered for the most part, face crinkling with an expression caught halfway between a smile and a jeer.

“You still love me,” he shoots back without missing a beat; again, Jennifer just laughs.

“Oh, c’mon, even you know better than that,” she teases, her voice dropping to the register she always speaks in when she makes this joke – a little bit bitter, a little bit too-true, “You and I aren’t capable of _love_.”

“So then what are we doing with each other?” Leon asks, with none of his former mirth. When Jennifer turns to look at him, he’s staring back with a painfully sincere expression on his face, the grey, watery light from outside making his skin look washed out and sick. Sincerity has never been apart of their relationship, and it’s so unpredictable, so alien and new, Jennifer finds her mind stumbling to a halt. She wants to say something gentle, something kind – anything to soften the desperate look on Leon’s face.

“We’re using each other,” she says instead, in that same mocking tone, because anything more vulnerable than that might kill her, “Obviously.”

“Right,” Leon says with a sigh and a roll of the eyes; he doesn’t look disappointed like she’d expected, “ _Obviously._ ”

With that, his posture relaxes, as he sinks back into the polyester seat and rests his head against the window. She realizes, watching him settle down for a nap, bag still cradled tightly to his chest, that she’d just told him exactly what he wanted to hear. The thought fills her with that same wild, aching dread from before – the kind without a name. The kind she’ll spend the rest of her life pretending isn’t there.

**xxx**

Once the rain has finally stopped and Leon is asleep, Jennifer finds herself alone with her thoughts. The sky above her is a matte grey; the concrete of the city blackened by the rain. It has never looked less like spring. She and Leon had first met a little over a year ago now, at the first and last group therapy session either of them would ever attend. They were bonded instantly by a shared sense of apathy, despite the five years difference in their ages. Jennifer knew she was a bad influence on Leon, but the way he carried himself – like he was trying to fit into an ego too big for the rest of him – made it hard for her to leave him alone. That was exactly how she had carried herself at nineteen, after all. She hadn’t had an adult to look after her, nobody to influence her for better or for worse. Leon, despite all his flaws, deserved that.

So Jennifer had been there for him, when he signed up for community college. She had been there when he’d dropped out. She’d been there every time he’d come over to her house before, after an argument with someone in his family or one of his other, shittier friends. She never knew how to help Leon, but then again, he never asked for help.

The brake lights of the car in front of hers suddenly glow cherry red, startling Jennifer out of her reverie. She slams her foot down, perhaps harder than necessary, and the car jerks to a stop. The sudden movement jostles Leon awake with a gasp; he blinks blearily up at her, arms in a vice grip around his bag.

“Sorry,” Jennifer says with a sheepish smile that feels more like a grimace. Leon hides his face in the fabric of his bag and lets out an audible yawn, then returns her smile with one of his own, sleepy and unbothered. Some of his mascara had flaked off while he slept, leaving little black freckles on the very tops of his cheeks.

“It’s alright, Jen,” he sighs and stretches his arms until his shoulders click loudly. When he next opens his eyes, he seems slightly more alert, and asks, “Where are we?”

“We’re real close,” she says, and it’s true. The turn she knows she needs to take to reach the station is only another block or so away. “So, y’know, it’s actually a good thing you’re up!”

Leon doesn’t reply to her verbally, instead giving her a quick grin and unfolding his curled up legs. As he stretches his whole body out, Jennifer watches the baby blue backpack teeter on his lap, and finally lets her curiosity get the better of her.

“What’s in the bag, anyways?” she asks with a tone she hopes is nonchalant. She half-expects Leon to become defensive, but he doesn’t even hesitate before unzipping the bag to reveal a few articles of colorful clothing and a yellow-sequined makeup bag, as well as a bundle of what must be at least a thousand dollars in cash.

“Holy _shit_ – where in the –,” she says, and she can feel her voice wavering though she isn’t quite sure why. Leon won’t stop smiling. “Where did you get _that?_ ”

“I asked Aunt Maeve for it,” he answers easily. The true weight of their situation – of the money in his bag, and the train ticket he’s about to buy, and this entire car ride – finally hits Jennifer. Maeve is the only member of Leon’s family that treats him with any kindness, she knows this, but she also knows that Maeve would never give Leon that kind of money without a good reason. She cannot imagine that Leon has a good reason.

“What did you say to her?” Jennifer asks, and Leon just shrugs, as if she’d asked him about something as simple as the weather.

“I said what I needed to say,” she feels her heart begin to race, rabbit-fast and thudding painfully against her ribcage, just like when Beau told her about Celeste being born. She can put a name to it now: it’s the anticipation of losing something. It’s the feeling of regretting things she hasn’t even done yet. Leon doesn’t seem to notice her rising panic, or if he does, he doesn’t care. Instead he continues, “I might have lied, sure, but it’s not my fault if she’s willing to believe me.”

“You –,” Jennifer starts to say, then stutters to a halt. She isn’t quite sure what to say. She isn’t quite sure she should say anything at all, but what ends up coming out of her mouth is, “You’re that serious about this?”

“C’mon, Jennifer, you know you’re way smarter than me,” Leon tuts as he zips the bag back up, “You have to realize this was inevitable.”

Jennifer’s mind races to recall every moment she’d spent with Leon over the year they’d known each other, scanning each memory for clues that this was going to happen, but she finds none. Scanning his face now – smiling dully at her, posture perfectly relaxed – she finds none. _Inevitable,_ he’d said, and for a second she just gapes at him before she finds the strength to ask, “Are you unhappy here?”

Leon laughs at her.

“Do I look unhappy?” he says. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and his eyes – without his glasses – look so small and dark. For the second time this evening, she can hardly recognize him. This is a version of Leon she’d never met before. She wants to try to comfort him, but he cuts her off by saying, “Please make sure not to miss our turn.”

With a jolt, she looks back to the road and realizes she can hardly see through the windshield – the rain had started back up at some point. She turns the windshield wipers on first, and then the left turn indicator. Within a handful of seconds, they are pulling up to the curb outside the station. There’s a decent crowd of pedestrians, holding dark-colored umbrellas over their heads like a forest of black trees. Leon pulls the glovebox open and fishes out a hot pink umbrella belonging to Jennifer. It’s clear he intends on taking it.

“Why are you leaving,” she asks in a flat voice. Leon is readying himself to exit the car, sliding the straps of the bag over his shoulders. Jennifer worries, for a second, that he’s going to go without answering her, but when he puts his hand on the door’s handle, he turns to look at her.

“I have no reason to stay,” he says with a shrug, “I love my family, and they love me, but that has nothing to do with this.”

Jennifer believes that Leon’s family has _everything_ to do with this, but she also believes that Leon wouldn’t agree with her if she said as such. His expression, as he cracks the passenger-side door open and begins to step out of her car, is sad but sincere. Above the din of the crowd outside, she hears an announcement through the station’s PA system. This is her last chance to convince Leon he’s making a mistake.

“You could stay with me.”

Leon laughs at her again, softer this time, and rolls his eyes. “Stop making this a big deal,” he says, and once he’s standing on the curb he pushes the umbrella open. She leans over the console to continue talking to him, and he bends at the waist to continue talking to her. She glances behind him, at the shuffling crowd of people outside the station, and then turns her eyes back to his face.

“Will you at least call me?” she asks, “Will you at least come back and visit?”

“Of course I will!” he says, beaming at her, and she knows she will never see Leon again. She knows there was never going to be anything she could say to change his mind. This wasn’t inevitable, not like he said, but it wasn’t something she could fix. She was never going to be a good enough person to make Ocean City a place Leon could feel safe living in.

 _You were a terrible older sister,_ echoes the voice of someone else inside Jennifer’s head.

“Alright,” she says, because she knows now that what she says doesn’t matter, “Bye, Leon.”

“Bye, Jenny!” he says, with a cheerful wave of one hand, the one not clutching her umbrella, “I love you!”

He doesn’t give her the opportunity to say _I love you, too_ before he slams the door shut and begins to walk away. At first, Jennifer intends on sitting there, watching the bright pink umbrella disappear into a sea of dark ones, not driving off until he’s completely gone from her line of sight, but then the car behind her honks impatiently. She puts the car into drive and pulls away from the curb – when she looks into the rearview mirror, the only color she can see is grey.


End file.
